Welcome to the OpenSea digest. Let’s look back through the biggest NFT and web3 news of the week.

Emi Kusano uses AI to examine identity and image in new Tokyo exhibition

Japanese digital artist Emi Kusano is presenting her work at √K Contemporary, a Tokyo art gallery in the historic Kagurazaka neighborhood filled with galleries and cultural spaces. 

In her new series "Ornament Survival," Kusano uses artificial intelligence trained on photographs of her own face and body to generate multiple versions of herself, then arranges them in scenes that reference Kusano’s own nostalgia for Japanese culture of the 1980s and 1990s.

According to the exhibition's curator, Kensho Tambara, the work examines how pop culture encourages viewers, especially women, to continuously tweak how they look and present themselves to stay visible in a world drowning in information and images.

Mastercard gets the green light to operate crypto services in New York

Mastercard has secured its BitLicense, official permission from the New York State Department of Financial Services to offer cryptocurrency services to residents, marking a regulatory win for the payment giant. 

The company now plans to integrate stablecoins and crypto debit cards into its traditional payment network, partnering with over 100 companies including PayPal, Gemini, and MetaMask. 

Mastercard is also buying stablecoin infrastructure startup BVNK as part of its push to let Americans spend digital money at regular stores like they would traditional credit cards.

XRP Ledger rolls out NFT cleanup and AMM upgrade

The XRP Ledger, the blockchain network behind the XRP cryptocurrency, is pushing out a software update that automatically deletes expired digital collectibles and fixes accounting problems in its lending system. The update also prevents transactions from sending more money than accounts are allowed to hold and makes sure loan records update properly when borrowers default or miss payments. 

Anyone running a node had to download the update, though XRP holders don't necessarily have to do anything. 

Separately, XRPL developers have put forward a draft proposal, AMM Swappable Curves, that would extend the network's existing automated market maker infrastructure with two new pool types: concentrated liquidity, which lets liquidity providers target specific price ranges for greater capital efficiency, and StableSwap, an approach optimized for assets that trade near the same value, like stablecoins. The proposal also lays groundwork for a future fully programmable pool type that would allow custom trading logic to run directly on the network.

NEAR launches private cryptocurrency trades between blockchain networks

The NEAR blockchain has rolled out a new feature that lets people trade cryptocurrency privately between NEAR and Ethereum without exposing their transactions to the public. 

It's designed to address privacy concerns for anyone using decentralized exchanges, where normally your trading activity is visible on the blockchain for everyone to see. 

The move is part of NEAR's broader effort to make it simpler for people to move money across different blockchain networks without jumping between multiple apps and services.

SEC clears Nasdaq Bitcoin index options

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has approved Nasdaq’s plan to list Bitcoin index options on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. These are contracts that let traders buy or sell based on Bitcoin’s price without ever owning any BTC, with their profit or loss paid out in U.S. dollars when the contract expires. 

The contracts will reportedly trade under the ticker QBTC once the Commodity Futures Trading Commission gives its final approval. They will track the Nasdaq Bitcoin Index, which is a number built from real-time Bitcoin prices gathered from major crypto exchanges and benchmark data. 

Regulators say the new BTC index options gives investors a familiar, exchange-traded way to get exposure to Bitcoin’s price moves using the same system used for traditional options trading.

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